Corte dei Venti

The row before the barrel

Andrea Brocco reads the rows before the cellar, working as winemaker at Corte dei Venti in Piancornello, Montalcino. His title at the estate is enologist and agronomist, which matters here because the work does not separate cleanly into vineyard and winery. The same person who studies the vine has to answer for the wine after harvest. Brocco trained at Università di Pisa, then brought that scientific discipline to a family-run estate whose name, Court of the Winds, is less ornament than instruction. The vineyards sit in the southern part of the Montalcino appellation, on hilly slopes with red soils and sea winds moving through them. At this scale, the bench is the vineyard row, the cellar, and the decision between them. Corte dei Venti has been tied to family winegrowing since 1943, and Brocco’s present work belongs to that continuum rather than a separate authorial signature. He is asked to keep the estate coherent, season after season, through agronomy first and enology after, with Sangiovese as the material that carries every choice forward.

Five hectares of estate Sangiovese

The program is narrow by design: estate-grown Sangiovese for Brunello di Montalcino DOCG, worked within an organic philosophy on about 5 hectares of vines. The estate produces roughly 20,000 bottles annually, a size that keeps the method close to the hands and leaves little room for anonymous fruit. Corte dei Venti does not rely on purchased grapes, so harvest timing, vine balance, and cellar direction remain inside the same discipline. The site gives Brocco a clear set of pressures to read. Red soils, rich in iron and clay, bring structure; constant sea winds help keep the vineyard clean and temper the heat of the southern hills. In the cellar, the flagship wine ages for 36 months in large Slavonian oak botti, a traditional vessel that supports slow maturation without turning Sangiovese into an oak exercise. The wider Brunello rule asks for 5 years before release, including 2 years in wood, but the house’s own rhythm is felt in that longer passage through large cask.

Wind through the cellar door

The place is small enough for the vineyard to remain present even when the work moves indoors. The tasting room, the cellar, and the rows around the estate share the same rural quiet, with the southern Montalcino light falling across Terre Rosse and the air moving steadily from the sea. Nothing about the setting feels staged for grandeur. The pleasure is in proportion: a family estate, a restrained cellar program, and a landscape that keeps insisting on its terms. In the room, the wines read back through that sequence, soil first, then wind, then the patience of large oak. For Brocco, the next proof is not a public flourish but the same annual return to Sangiovese, including Corte dei Venti Brunello di Montalcino DOCG 2012.